Conversations with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development

Jason Warner (CTO at GitHub) joined the show to talk with us about the backstory of how he helped to lead GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Specifically how they trusted their gut not just the data, and how they understood the value they were bringing to market. We also talk about Jason’s focus on “horizon 3” for GitHub, and his thoughts on remote work and how they’re leading GitHub engineering today.

In late 2019, Bill Nichols, a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University with the Software Engineering Institute published his study on “the 10x developer myth.” On this show we talk with Bill about all the details of his research. Is the 10x developer a myth? Let’s find out.

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content.

We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

We’re joined by Ron Evans at OSCON on the expo hall floor talking about Go and how it’s eating the world of software. Specifically we’re talking about TinyGo and what they’re doing to bring the Go programming language to micro-controllers and modern web browsers. According to Ron Evans, “embedded systems and Go are the most exciting things happening right now.”

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software.

Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.

We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post “How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019” a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

We’re talking with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, Warewulf, and most recently Singularity — an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for enterprise and high-performance computing workloads. What’s interesting is how Singularity allows untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. We cover the backstory, Singularity Pro and how they’re not holding the open source community version hostage, as well as how Singularity is being used to containerize and support workflows in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and more.

Adam and Jerod talk to Kyle Daigle, the Director of Ecosystem Engineering at GitHub. They talk about GitHub Actions, the new automation platform announced at GitHub Universe this past October 2018. GitHub Actions is the next big thing coming out of GitHub with the promise of powerful workflows to supercharge your repos and GitHub experience. Build your container apps, publish packages to registries, or automate welcoming new users to your open source projects — with access to interact with the full GitHub API and any other public APIs, Actions seem to have limitless possibilities.

On this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode we’re going behind the scenes to look back at 2018 as we prepare for 2019 and onward. We talk through our most popular episodes, most controversial episodes, and even some of our personal favorites. We also catch you up on some company level updates here at Changelog Media. We hired Tim Smith earlier this year as our Senior Producer, we retired Request for Commits, started some new shows…

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts.

They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled “Setting expectations for open source participation” and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what’s the goal?

They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there’s a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it’s an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it’s about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it.

Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly Twitter alternative, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why you would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

From open source project to a $3.8 million dollar seed round to transform Gatsby.js into a full-blown startup that’s building what’s becoming the defacto modern web frontend. In this episode, we talk with Jason Lengstorf about this blazing-fast static site generator, its building blocks and how they all fit together, the future of web development on the JAMstack (JavaScript + APIs), the importance of site performance, site rebuilds, getting started, and how they’re focused on building an awesome product and an awesome community.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she’s seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack’s growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.

We talked with Miguel de Icaza last week at Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Miguel gave us the backstory on how he’s been competing with Microsoft for most of his developer career, and he shares the history of GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin — and what led him to now work at Microsoft.

If you find yourself chasing shiny objects and squirrels all time, you should 💯 listen to this episode featuring Ozan Onay (President of Bradfield School of Computer Science) where we discuss his recent blog post entitled You Are Not Google which was the #1 link in Changelog Weekly - Issue #159. This show is full of wisdom and advice for every developer out there.

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that’s rallying around this new way to think about APIs.

Tim Hockin and Aparna Sinha joined the show to talk about the backstory of Kubernetes inside Google, how Tim and others got it funded, the infrastructure of Kubernetes, and how they’ve been able to succeed by focusing on the community.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Senior Staff Technologist at the EFF and the lead developer of Let’s Encrypt, joined the show to talk about the history of SSL, the start of Let’s Encrypt, why it’s important to encrypt the web and what happens if we don’t, Certbot, and the impact Let’s Encrypt has had on securing the web.

Sandi Metz joined the show to talk about her beginnings on a mainframe, her 30+ years of programming experience, the ins and outs of OOP, her book Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (aka POODR), as well as her latest book 99 Bottles of OOP which she co-authored with Katrina Owen. We also covered a few listener submitted questions at the end.

Since airing this show, Pieter passed away due to his battle with a metastasis of bile duct cancer in both lungs. But rather than listen to this show with sadness, listen with a happy heart and let’s celebrate Pieter’s life, and what he has accomplished. Thank you Pieter from the bottom of our hearts for your time on this show and for all that you are. You are loved by us my friend. This show will forever be a very special show for us.

Pieter Hintjens is the creator of ZeroMQ and The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4), a writer of many books and protocols, as well as a developer with decades of building software and communities – he’s someone who’s given so much, and continues to give - even up until the time he is planning for his death.

Big show! Matz, creator of the Ruby programming language, joined the show to discuss where he began as a programmer, the origins of Ruby, its history and future, Ruby 3.0, concurrency and parallelism, Streem, Erlang, Elixir, and more.

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about curl and libcurl and how he has spent at least 2 hours every day for the past 17 years working on and maintaining curl. That’s over 13k hours! We covered the origins of curl, how he chooses projects to work on, why he has remained so dedicated to curl all these years, the various version control systems curl has used, licensing, and more.